I spoke last week at the Dallas ASP.NET User Group meeting about IIS 7.0.  The talk ended a little earlier than I expected, so we opened things up to general questions, and just started discussing whatever came up.  One question I asked the group was "have any of you played with the ASP.NET Futures release yet"?  Almost everyone in the room had not heard about ASP.NET futures, and someone suggested that it would make a great blog series.  I took that to heart - so here it is. 

Over the next few weeks, it is my intent to post articles about the new features included in the Microsoft ASP.NET Futures release including:

• ASP.NET Futures
• History support for the Safari browser, inclusion of “titles”, encoding and encrypting of server-side history state and the ability to handle history in the client without a server requirement.
• CSS Selectors APIs have been modified to be applicable to W3C recommendations.
• A script resource extraction tool that allows you to create script files on disk that originate from embedded resources in assemblies.
• Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET
• Buffering and downloading support, download progress and live streaming support has been added to the MediaSkins of the Media control.
• Client-side playlist (.ASX) support.
• Dynamic Data Controls for ASP.NET
• ASP.NET Application Services
• Adding search to your web site
• Publich custom dynamic sitemaps
• Capture and report on Javascript errors
• Dynamic Language support in ASP.NET

I am looking forward to diving into these new features, and I hope you enjoy reading the series.  It'll be fun to dive into ASP.NET again, especially as it gives me a chance to spend even more time with my new friend Silverlight :-)